


Velvet Spacetime

by metal_eye



Category: Adam Lambert (Musician), American Idol RPF, Kris Allen (Musician)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Science Fiction, Ambiguous/Open Ending, Escape Pod, Hypothermia, Impending Death, Kradam in Space, M/M, Science Fiction
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-10-26
Updated: 2014-10-26
Packaged: 2018-02-22 16:01:51
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,660
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/2513582
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/metal_eye/pseuds/metal_eye
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Captain Lambert should have gone down with his ship, but Kris wouldn't let that happen.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Velvet Spacetime

**Author's Note:**

> So... I was invited to post this sucker on ao3 about 3 years ago. It's long overdue, but hey, here I am!
> 
> There was a prompt from jerakeen. "Scifi AU! Crossovers welcome! They're stuck in an escape pod with no power! They think they're dying! There are embarrassing confessions!" 
> 
> This ate my life. There's even a full-length soundtrack. Tracklist upon request.

“It’s all right, you know.”

The captain turns his head, and Kris almost expects a cracking sound, like ice freeing itself from a frozen neck. But there is only a voice. “What is?”

“The _Sleepwalker_ going down. I mean, it’s not all right—not really—but this—it isn’t your fault.”

Captain Lambert looks dubious enough to crush Kris’s halfassed attempts at consolation. “I’m the _captain_ ,” he says. “Of _course_ it’s my fault.”

Kris shakes his head, even though it hurts so badly he’s afraid it might pop off his neck like a cheap popsicle. “Don’t blame yourself,” he says. “Don’t. You’re a starship captain, not a saint. Not a martyr. It’s good you made it out. It’s good…”

“… good you dragged me into a tiny escape pod built for one instead of letting me go down with my ship?”

“I’m sorry, sir,” Kris says. The comment escapes his mouth with a rush of crystallized oxygen chasing it away.

Captain Lambert smiles. There is frost forming on his lips.

 

_“It’s only going to get colder. This thing isn’t designed to patch itself up like a full-sized craft. We’ve got twelve hours, maybe less.”_

_“We’re nowhere near a planet.”_

_“No.”_

_“So nobody’s coming.”_

_“Likely not.”_

Kris is so cold he can feel the air beginning to numb his extremities, making disembodied cushions of them as if he were asleep against pillows with velvet cases.

He tries not to be too disappointed in this lack of sensitivity – any warmth would undoubtedly give away his unrelenting crush on the captain, who is now gazing coolly at the energy monitor.

“It’s Adam, not ‘sir’. And don’t be sorry,” Adam says. “I’d rather be stuck in here with you than one of the morons from tech...”

Kris isn’t sure how to take this. “Uh, thanks.”

“What I mean is—”

_That I’m a moron,_ Kris thinks _. I’m not cut out for this. The cold, or the outer universe._

 

Kris always felt wholly unwelcome in space, unwanted, like a kidney stone being rocketed too far past its home galaxy, then just floating around while waiting to be spat out of some starry universal tract.

He expected it. It was inevitable. Like space officer natural selection, or something.

He didn’t count on being ejected alongside someone else.

But when the time came, he had no choice.

 

“—that I like you.”

_What?_

“What?” Kris echoes the freezing voice in his head.

Adam’s lip curls, shiny from the cold. “I _like_ you. You remind me of all these cadets back when I first enlisted… pale, eager, and clean-pressed, like a lineup of panfish about to be tossed into a pool of space-pirahna.”

“Hey,” Kris says. “I’m not THAT innocent.”

“Oh? Then why haven’t we discussed the single-person biofreeze capsule in here? I can’t be the only one contemplating who gets it, and who freezes to death.”

Kris’s heartbeat lurches, like his arteries hit a pothole.

Then he remembers why he dragged the half-delirious captain into this escape pod in the first place. And it only has a little bit to do with the galaxy of black hair and unrelenting smile.

“I’m a cadet,” he states solidly. “You’re the captain. You deserve the capsule. I’ll just make the best of it.”

There is snowy silence. An odd kind of white noise.

“ _Adam,”_ Kris presses, despite himself.

“No.”

“No?”

“No. I can’t let you do that.”

Adam reaches back and pushes a button to release the biofreeze capsule. It opens up between them like a challenge.

“You first,” says Adam.

Kris thinks that being stared at by Adam Lambert is almost more intimidating than facing hypothermic temperatures in empty space.

“Me… first?” Kris hesitates. “But biofreeze…”

“Is quantitative technology, yes. Comes with a limit, sure. A maximum capacity of one. One capsule per one person. Enough energy to sustain one person. Chemical testing conducted for one person. Crawl in there and… we cut our chances in half.”

Kris can’t process what he is hearing. He is not the half of anything, much less half the survival potential of the famous Captain Adam Lambert. There is nothing equal here.

“We’re equals now. We’ll be at equal odds,” says Adam, as if in telepathic response.

“Are you kidding? That thing is _not_ built for two of us,” Kris tries. “I’m not even an _officer,_ for god’s sake—I’m a cadet. And you’re the _captain!_ _I_ should have stayed behind, gone down… I don’t know why—”

“You saved me,” Adam says.

Kris swallows.                          

“I _did not_ want to be saved. The least you can do to repay me, now, is to do what I say.”

The blue light of sleep chamber glows: OPEN.

That’s when Adam climbs in, and Kris wants him so badly to close the capsule upon himself, too quick, leaving Kris to the jaws of space and cold and guaranteeing only one man’s survival.

But Kris also, selfishly, wants _him_ – Adam – a captain who was always too far away to touch – curled around him, breathing frost on the closed glass, like some twisted version of the lovers in ‘Let It Snow’ giving themselves encapsulated comfort and happiness.

Well, not happiness, in this case. More like the closest thing to a non-nightmare.

Kris doesn’t deserve either.

But that’s when Adam _extends his hand,_ the fucker, uncurls his freezing fingers though it must hurt him, offering a chance that ought to be his alone, scooting over against the glass and leaving a cadet-shaped space in his wake.

The ‘open’ light is luminescent, reflecting in Adam’s eyes, reflecting the stars, bending backwards and forwards like a hologram, beckoning.

Kris sighs.

Muscles protesting, he unsticks himself from the side of the escape pod – _don’t expend the excess energy!_ his freezing body screams – and folds himself over the side of the hypersleep capsule, bracing his hand against the captain’s hip, which might have embarrassed him in warmer circumstances. As it is, he falls awkwardly against Adam’s uniformed figure, dwarfed but equally vulnerable, settling somewhere between inappropriate and necessary.

Only after a slow-moving minute does Kris dare to crane his neck, joints protesting, to look up at the captain.

His face is blank. Their eyes don’t meet. Their breath is so visible it’s practically solid.

Adam’s lips nearly match his eyes in blue, but he doesn’t close the capsule. There’s an average of two minutes of consciousness between closure and sleep, and they both need more than that to adjust to this.

“Thank you,” the captain says.

“I don’t understand, sir,” says Kris.

“What don’t you understand? And stop calling me ‘sir’.”

“… Adam.” It still feels wrong to say it. “Why you would want—I mean—aside from your honor, and all that… you’re so much more important to the union as a whole—”

“Okay, look—what _is_ your name, then?”

“Allen, s—er. Allen. Kris Allen.”

“Kris, then.” Sudden first-name basis. Must be the hypothermia. “Here’s what you need to understand: a captain goes down with his ship. All traces of rank and command were left back on the _Sleepwalker._ A few explosions afterwards and we’re just a couple of suckers floating in space.”

Adam shifts his body, curling inward, bringing his forehead down to Kris’s level.

“Don’t understand, you say? You can’t have wanted to survive, yourself. You’re the one who dragged me in here. Couldn’t do it alone?”

Kris wants to cry at his own cowardice, but he doesn’t know if the salt will crystallize in the cold freeze his eyelids open. “I’m sorry. I wish I could…”

“What? Resurrect my ship? Steer us clear of deep space? Dissolve these bullshit ranks and just—” Adam chokes. “Just be ourselves?”

“You’re so much more than I could ever pretend to—”

“Shut up,” Adam says, weak-voiced from the cold. “Just… stop it. Would you say that if you had saved a lieutenant? You could have, you know. Why didn’t you? Why take me?”

Kris knows, but doesn’t say.

Adam’s countenance is beginning to crack. “I’m not even a captain now. Without a ship, I’m just…”

“It’s not that you wanted to die, is it?”

Silence waits, bearing weight no longer.

“It’s that you were supposed to.”

Adam says nothing, but by his bitter breathing, Kris can tell it’s the truth.

Kris isn’t sure if time is slowing down because his metabolism is going into hibernation or because he wants so badly for these moments to stretch themselves. Either way, it feels like forever before he gets the courage to speak again. “Even without a ship…” he says, bringing one hand up to rest on the captain’s chest, over his insignia. “You’ve still got this.”

“Symbolism,” Adam whispers. “Nothing solid.” His hand is now over Kris’s, somehow. Resting upon his heart. Keeping it warm. “At least not for long.”

The heartbeat is slowing. He doesn’t move his hand.

 

Kris has only been in biofreeze once—a reluctant reconnaisance to complete his training. He hoped he would wake up on the other side changed, somehow. But he had to drink himself sick before being coaxed into the capsule—oblong and inoffensive save for being small and intimidating—and the technology preserved his inebriated state, so the whole mission seemed sleepy and surreal.

Still, before the freeze and after, it was always the same. Equal sides of time. No change – just a different set of stars.

 

Reading his mind again, Adam says, “Why didn’t you ever seek a promotion? You’re young, capable…”

“I’m nobody,” Kris says. “I don’t know why I’m even here. It’s not… you know how some people are destined for greatness? I’m destined for obscurity. I should have stayed in my own galaxy.

“I thought enlisting would change me, but it didn’t. I’m too small for space. I’m so small I can’t even die alone. It’s why I won’t stand out, ever. Support doesn’t make a superior officer out of anyone. Standing by yourself does.

“I’m talking too much. I should stop. It’s a waste of oxygen, isn’t it?”

“No. It’s a nice distraction.” Adam lets a breath loose, short and silver— _hah_. “You have a warm voice. Wish I could wrap it around us.”

It’s not the only wished thing, Kris thinks. Which feels wrong. Like so much else. The universe is choppy—death in space is short, explosive. Nothing like this weightless rapture, catering to whim, vaguely shifting like ice on a lake—some velvety demise with no real conclusion.

“You’re not nobody, Kris,” says Adam.

The confinement and the cold make philsophical treatises out of what would otherwise be mundane statements. Kris understands this, though everything in him chatters, and it doesn’t take the beauty from the way Adam says his name. Like he matters.

“I remember you from launch. You were clean-cut. Pouty. Everyone else was so rugged looking, trying to prove something, trying to not care. You were just staring at me, pretty-faced and unassuming. Staring at me and then staring at the floor. Like you knew you weren’t perfect.

“Everyone pretends to be so tough and stoic. I respect officers who admit to their weaknesses… who can still function in fear.

“You’re claustrophobic, right? That hesitation – I’ve seen it before. Bad experience with biofreeze in the past.”

Kris thinks that if there were enough heat in him to blush, he would be doing that.

“You still got in,” Adam whispers. “And to a shared space, besides. Almost symbiotic. But you did it. That takes gall.”

Kris’s vision is blurring, like little blizzard dots on a screen with interference, and his extremeties are falling asleep in a similar way: pinpricks and white noise. Despite the length of contact, he has to keep his eyes fixated on their hands, his and Adam’s, to reassure himself that they’re actually touching.

They are. The whole arm. Adam has not reacted sharply to any point of proximity.

Of course, Kris thinks, he’s numb—they both are—but he wants to believe it’s because of trust, to a degree, almost affection?

It would be like him to hope for such a simple thing in the face of chilled death.

Though if Kris envisioned a scenario in which he got up close and personal with Adam Lambert, it wouldn’t be half-dead groping in the below-freezing temperatures of a one-person escape pod.

“I’m jealous of you, actually,” Adam says. “Of your lack of responsibility, real attachment. Your… abandon.”

“I don’t have any abandon,” Kris mutters.

“Oh? Could have fooled me. You didn’t show much cause for caution when you dragged me out of that engine fire.”

“You were awake for that?”

“Awake enough. Incapacitated, but awake.”

Kris says nothing. He can feel the frost connecting their bodies, forming bridges, burning, growing deadly bonds. Freezing shut.

“I have to close up,” says Adam, nearly stuttering. “We’ll freeze to death. Even half a biofreeze capsule gives us better chances.”

“Why give yourself a chance now? Why not before?” Kris asks, though he thinks he knows the answer.

“I don’t know,” Adam says, after a moment. “I don’t—I shouldn’t—without my ship—”

“Shhh,” says Kris, stupidly. Silence solves nothing in the face of unconsciousness.

But it acts like a salve. His captain shifts, from shoulder to spine, nervous to resigned, aimless to straight ahead.

Except the egg-shaped glass and the metal of the escape pod obscure their view of space, so there is no starscape, no vastness—just not-so-solitary confinement and the sounds of coiled breathing.

“Just pretend you’re going to sleep,” says Adam, some time after the silence. “And when you wake up, this shit will all seem like a dream.”

We’ll just wait, Kris thinks. Days or weeks or however long it takes. “What if we don’t wake up?”

“Well.” The unspoken fear. Adam faced it. “You said it yourself. Destined for an obscure death.”

“I didn’t mean you. I thought I was saving you. I thought—”

“I thought a lot of things before this,” Adam whispers. “Not so much, now. My brain is going. It’s blacking out.”

“Mine too,” says Kris. “I mean. I can’t really think.”

“Are you ready, then? While I can still function…”

“Almost,” says Kris.

He figures that if they’re going to sleep, he might as well make himself comfortable, so he raises his head, fighting the freezing soreness—as well as any lingering awkwardness—and leans his head against his captain’s shoulder, into the crevice of his neck. Their skin seems to fuse together, crystals forming as Kris feels the warmth connecting as best it can.

“You know…”

Kris doesn’t know how Adam still has a voice, but he listens.

“I thought I wanted to go down with my ship. That I was supposed to. But it’s less lonely, this way.”

Kris smiles, feeling slowed down, but no less sentient. He wishes his lips would move.

“And whether this works or not, I’m glad I’m going down with you instead.”

Adam clicks something above his head, and the glass covers them, announcing the end of speech.

In the dark, Kris feels a kiss against his temple – cold and sharp, but caught up in the moment, connected beyond space.

Then he sleeps.

 

 

EPILOGUE

_There are two of them, Admiral._

_Two? In the same capsule?_

_Yes. One of them is Captain Adam Lambert, sir. From the_ Sleepwalker.

_And the other?_

_He’s a cadet, sir._

_Well, put the captain in recovery! The world needs to hear his story._

_Um, they’re stuck together, sir._

_Excuse me?_

_We can’t take them apart. The frost must have formed on their uniforms before the biofreeze set in. We’ll have to put them in recovery together._

_Well, of course. That’s what I meant._

_And, there’s one more thing, Admiral…_

_Yes?_

_Captain Lambert is showing no signs of biological energy._

_… so he didn’t make it._

_It’s hard to say, sir._

_What about the cadet?_

_He’s alive._

_Well, then, identify him. And put him in the recovery center, stat! I want to hear him talk. I want to know exactly who he is._


End file.
